11/10. Another damp and rainy weekend in New York. On Saturday afternoon after the rain, the sidewalks alongside the nearby Carl Schurz Park were covered by a wet carpet of fallen foliage plastered against the pavement. Reverie. Nostalgia. I took a picture of the tree in front of my building because the yellow was so magically brilliant and bold and I wanted to celebrate it. Soon to be swept away by the winds and the cold grays of December.
The Obama excitement has been in the air. The papers are full of advice. I prefer to wait and see. He’s so young looking. Soon he will face even newer more complex and challenging problems involving the nation’s financials.
There is a prevailing sense in the American people that someone can always come up with the jack to solve the problem, whatever the problem. It is very possible, however, that the President six times before Mr. Obama, Mr. Eisenhower, was prescient in his Farewell Address. If you don’t know what Ike said, you can easily look it up. You will see that President Eisenhower had vision, very very rare in contemporary life, maybe always. That is what will be required of our new President, a kind of far seeing-ness to navigate the stormy waters. Because he is new, and fresh, and young and smart, the optimist in me prefers to think he has it. If it should turn out that he doesn’t have vision, the optimist in me will continue to think someone does.
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| The yellow thriller yesterday afternoon, sunless at 4 PM. |
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I am most interested in watching Mrs. Obama. I have a feeling that she is an optimist’s ideal. She seems to be a woman who is resolute, who is concerned about her children and her family, and is very aware of the need for community to protect our families. I could be wrong but if you thought Hillary Clinton was proactive, wait’ll you see Michelle Obama. But that is just my intuition.
What will happen to these two young people now entering this Presidential Persona process – the most astounding process possibly on the planet right now, as President and First Lady of the United States – that is what I will be watching with curiosity and interest.
There are those who object to my writing about the President, at least this President-elect, in the NYSD. There are those who believe that if you mention a politician that they don’t favor, you’re being political. I don’t agree. Presidents are very powerful in the world and very much in the world I cover, no matter their party. Gore Vidal assures us that there is really only one party, what he calls “the Property Party” with two sections. Whether or not that is true, it is true that many people I report on have relationships zero to two degrees of separation with whoever is President.
These are the real privileged classes, kid yourself not. Many people I report on have active stakes in the corridors of power and in fact hold positions resembling ownership. Presidents are always only temporary visitors to those corridors of powers. Their backers are not temporary.
“Political” to me is when people are advanced or made rich or favored for economic purposes because of their political connections. And there are lots of those. Everywhere. We watch that go on all around us everyday. Even in the most esteemed administrations. In fact, in the world that I cover, a great many of the very wealthy, and the businesses, and the banks, financially support as many candidates as they can as a kind of hedge.
In the meantime, let’s hope the winner of this last Presidential election will do us right and lead us out of this morass that is enveloping us.
Meanwhile, life goes on (obla-dee-obla-dah). The benefit gala calendar in New York is as superractive as ever. Maybe moreso. Three, four major events a night on the weekday calendar.
The numbers in terms of dollar contributions have declined for some but not for others. Just one dinner I attended for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories last week grossed $4 million. The week before last I calculated that the four galas I’d attended had grossed seven or eight million dollars in aggregate. That’s good; because all of these organizations need the money to address our needs.
Not all of these galas are big grossers, of course. Some are just lovely evenings where the ladies get dressed up in the ballgowns and the men put on black tie. One such was the French Heritage Society dinner dance the Thursday before last.
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